Long-term effects of socioeconomic activity on ecological stability

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Kristina Douglass at Columbia University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying the impacts of different socioeconomic livelihood strategies on ecological systems. Around the world, the earliest periods of human history, which are dominated by small, mobile communities, are consistently the least well studied. Instead, archaeologists have primarily focused on large, hierarchical, sedentary societies, which skew our perspectives and conclusions to one very specific form of human social organization. However, living strategies employed by other types of human communities can shed light on successful lifeway strategies which are invaluable for defining “sustainability” and developing successful conservation policies in the present. By shifting our attention toward small-scale community environmental impacts, this project will provide new insights into past land-use strategies and their long-term resilience during past periods of extreme climatic fluctuation. As environmental conditions become increasingly erratic due to climate change, the findings of this research hold significance both to archaeological scholarship and modern land-use policy initiatives. This NSF postdoctoral fellowship will work to challenge traditional distinctions of “low-impact” and “high-impact” land-use and instead highlight the flexible nature of different economic strategies and their environmental impacts. The project seeks to answer the following questions: 1. How do long-term habitations of foraging communities impact local and regional soil and vegetation diversity; 2. How do these impacts compare with other socioeconomic groups (i.e., herders, agriculturalists)? And 3. How can differences and similarities observed in ecological impact by different socioeconomic strategies inform our understanding of sustainability in the present? By shifting attention toward small-scale community environmental impacts, this project will develop new approaches for identifying human ecological legacies. In turn, this will help improve our understanding of early human communities, their socioeconomic organizations, and impacts of different economic systems on landscape ecologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.